A former Director of Liberia’s Executive Protection Service, Sam Gaye has expressed grave concern over the U.S. prisoner swap with Russia in which a notorious gun dealer Viktor Bout was release in a deal for American professional basketball player Brittney Griner.
Mr. Gaye is a retired Supervisory Special Agent with both the U.S. Dept of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as a former Director, Executive Protective Services, during the regime of former President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, played a key role in the tracking and arrest of Bout as well as another Russian, Konstantin Yaroshenko who was arrested in Monrovia in May 2010 and convicted of a drug smuggling plot.
He has early on fear that any attempt to release Bout from futher detention will put he and his colleagues who arrested the arm dealer at serious risks on grounds that he might pursue them.
However, it came to reality that the U.S. government announced that that Griner had been swapped for Bout.
Griner, a star with the Phoenix Mecury in the US WNBA, was detained at the Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow for carrying illegal vape cartridges with hashish oil.
She was traveling to Russia to play for the country’s premier league team UMMC Ekaterinburg during the WNBA offseason, as she did every year. She was sentenced to nine years in prison back in August and was since moved to a penal colony in the Mordovia republic in November after losing her appeal.
Bout and Liberia civil war
Between 1989 and 2003, Bout sold weapons to Liberian warring factions–most notably former President Charles Taylor–busting several United Nations arms embargoes. Within that time, Taylor’s forces and rivals illegally exploited the country’s timber and mineral industries to buy Bout’s weapons.
Some 250,000 people were killed in the conflict, which spiraled to other countries in the region. The conflict degraded Liberia’s forest and the country became synonymous with “Logs of war” and “conflict timbers” across the world. The chaos stirred the reform in the logging sector.
It was Bout’s initiatives that proved helpful in transporting weapons to Liberia, through several West African countries.
Who is Viktor Bout?
Born on January 13, 1967, Viktor Anatolyevich Bout is a Russian arms dealer. An entrepreneur and former Soviet military translator, he used his multiple companies to smuggle weapons starting during the collapse of the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe to Africa and the Middle East during the 1990s and early 2000s
